Missing gigs on my imac?

Hi. quick question regarding hard drive space. My hard drive has about ~150 GB capacity and according to OS I am using about 40 gigs of it. However, when I run WhatSize, it tells me I only have 20 gigs used up on disk. Any idea where the missing 20 gigs went? Thanks in advance

Check iPhoto & iMovies Trash for starters, as each of those apps have their own Trash which can become bloated over time.

As for the 20GB that WhatSize recognises, this is about right for the modern Mac OS. As a platforms OS is updated and or re-invented, it will always accommodate more space on a Hard Drive than the previous version.

is whatsize only checking your user account? how about other users? make sure it is doing your entire drive
-chris

Remember too that the operating system and the applications make all kinds of invisible temp/cache/scratch files.

Thanks for all the help.

I didn't realize whatsize was only calculating info for the current user. When I tally the remaining files in the application and library folders I get almost 150 gigs total... with most of the vanishing 20 gigs taken up by garageband and some iLife stuff.

One more question - the iMac i purchased lists the hard drive space as 160, yet the finder says the max capacity is 150. Is this a normal difference or might something else be going on?

I ran carbon copy earlier and got an error message when I tried to create a backup, so I'm just trying to rule out that it did something bad.

Thanks again

Well for one thing if you read the fine print about the harddrive it will state something like "formated size smaller". Advertised size is 160 x 1,000,000,000 bytes when in fact this is not true, and yes it's a well known issue with every harddrive so apple is not screwing you over. 1 gig is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes and not 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Therefore the size would be 160 x (1,000,000,000/1,073,741,824) = 149 GB

cool thanks

yea the formatted volume is always smaller than stated...this is a hard drive and formatting issue and has nothing to do with a computer company such as apple, dell, HP, compaq etc.etc.....

Yeah harddrive companies should really switch to showing the true binary size and stop advertising the decimal size. It would save alot of new users alot of grief.